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Maritz integrates 11 separate business systems, banishes silos

If you ask someone at Maritz what the company does, the answer is: a little bit of everything. This holding company oversees seven separate companies that provide services from sales incentive programs to customer loyalty promotions to producing major corporate trade shows, meetings, and events.

These business units operates independently of the others, each with its own leaders, finance and accounting teams, KPIs, and business goals. Most importantly, each has its own technology stack to collect and manage business data.

However, while the technology solutions make sense individually, they made it nearly impossible for each subsidiary to effectively interact or easily share data with the corporate finance team. Each business unit had to manually copy and paste data into spreadsheets and then input the data into an unwieldy legacy planning system that hadn’t been updated in more than a decade.

Integrated data for real-time visibility

“Our planning system received the worst ratings from users. They were ready for a change,” says Erin Riesmeyer, financial analysis director at Maritz. “They were tired of the inflexibility of our existing tool. They felt they were way too bogged down with entering and reviewing data, and they didn’t have enough time to analyze that data.”

As a result, Maritz was able to use Adaptive Insights to integrate data from 11 separate systems into one platform, including data on business unit revenue, time utilization, GL balances, transaction details, and fixed assets. Maritz was able to achieve a unified, real-time view into its business for the first time in the organization’s more than 120-year history.

11 integrations, one source of truth

By integrating its various ERPs, CRMs, time tracking systems, and workforce systems, Maritz gave each business unit the flexibility to build separate yet standardized revenue models, in addition to creating standard models for facility rent charges and operating expenses that did not previously exist. Forecast changes now happen in real time, producing significant improvements in efficiency while allowing distributed teams around the country to work together within Adaptive Insights instead of emailing massive, complex spreadsheets back and forth.

Since each business unit provides professional services, labor is the most significant cost component for Maritz. The company used Adaptive Insights to create a standard workforce model for its business units. Maritz was then able to enter the salaries, taxes, 401(k) contributions, and other data for each of its 5,000-plus employees into the HR system and integrate it with its time tracking and forecasting data to better understand utilization by person and inform what future utilization might look like.

“We used to have to key in merit increases every year, one by one for every person. Now it’s done automatically in Adaptive Insights. It’s really created a much more efficient process in our workforce planning,” says Riesmeyer.

From integrations to insights

An added bonus to integrating its 11 systems is that reporting has become much more straightforward. Thanks to Adaptive Insights’ powerful reporting capabilities, Maritz was able to standardize and consolidate its reports from more than 300 down to 100 while making it simple to update a report with a click. This simplicity gives the corporate finance team and finance teams at each business unit more time to spend analyzing data and uncovering new business insights.

“I’m very proud of the success we’ve found with Adaptive Insights,” says Riesmeyer. “Our CFO said it was one of the most successful and streamlined implementations that we’ve had at Maritz in recent history, and that’s just phenomenal to hear.”